Trump Hired Whitaker to Lock Up Hillary Clinton

At the second presidential debate, Donald Trump pointed at Hillary Clinton and issued a chilling threat. “If I win,” he warned, “I am going to instruct my Attorney General to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it, and we’re going to have a special prosecutor.”

Trump has repeated variations of this threat many times. Like “Build the wall,” “Lock her up” is a core foundation of Trump’s platform. It has been treated differently, though — less literally, and more metaphorically, like a generalized mantra reminding MAGA-world that Trump’s enemies are evil and deserve to be banished. But a series of recent reports has made it clear that Trump intends this threat in the most literal sense.

Last night, the New York Times reported that Trump repeatedly directed his White House counsel, Don McGahn, to order the Department of Justice to investigate Clinton along with James Comey. The story presented the request as a dead end, put off by McGahn’s strategy of delay and trying to talk Trump out of a dangerous escalation. Yet it makes clear that McGahn never really extinguished Trump’s desire.

A later version of the story adds a significant new tidbit. Trump “repeatedly pressed Justice Department officials about the status of Clinton-related investigations, including [Matt] Whitaker when he was the chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations.”

This fact changes the cast of the story quite significantly. It suggests that McGahn didn’t really stop Trump’s impulse to sic the Department of Justice on Clinton at all. Instead, Trump simply stopped bringing the request to McGahn after he realized that McGahn wasn’t giving him the answer he wanted. Instead, he began working through Matt Whitaker.

As disturbing as Whitaker’s appointment appeared when it first broke, the picture has grown even darker since. The Washington Postreported last night that, from 2014 through 2017, Whitaker was paid $1.2 million by a right-wing nonprofit to advance pro-Republican legal theories. During the campaign, he frequently attacked Clinton, and after, began attacking Robert Mueller. David Corn has unearthed more details of Whitaker’s interviews during this period, which included calls for prosecuting Clinton.

These views helped propel Whitaker’s meteoric rise, from lawyer for a scam patent firm to chief of staff to the Attorney General (and the White House’s “eyes and ears” in the department) to, finally, Acting Attorney General. And in his position working as chief of staff to Sessions, Whitaker had not only repeated contact with Trump, but — as Murray Waas reported in a little-noticed scoop two weeks ago — advised Trump on how to pressure the department into submitting to his demands that it prosecute Clinton. CNN reports that Trump raised this with Whitaker (and his then-superior, Rod Rosenstein) several times.

All of these communications ought to constitute impeachable offenses. (Indeed, the FBI’s former general counsel points out that President Nixon did similar things, and this was cited in his impeachment referral.) But Nixon’s efforts to corrupt the department appear to be both less extensive and far less successful than Trump’s. After all, Trump has managed not only to open a back channel to the inner workings of a department that is supposed to operate with total independence; he has installed his stooge — a man he has suspiciously denied even knowing, even though they have met more than a dozen times — to run it. What plans have they laid?

#BREAKING: I’m told the entire @BPDAlerts Emergency Response Team has resigned from the team, a total of 57 officers, as a show of support for the officers who are suspended without pay after shoving Martin Gugino, 75. They are still employed, but no longer on ERT. @news4buffalo

In case you were wondering about the unmarked federal agents dotting Washington

Few sights from the nation’s protests in recent days have seemed more dystopian than the appearance of rows of heavily armed riot police around Washington, D.C., in drab military-style uniforms with no insignia, identifying emblems or names badges. Many of the apparently federal agents have refused to identify which agency they work for. “Tell us who you are, identify yourselves!” protesters demanded, as they stared down the helmeted, sunglass-wearing mostly white men outside the White House. Eagle-eyed protesters have identified some of them as belonging to Bureau of Prisons’ riot police units from Texas, but others remain a mystery.

The images of such heavily armed, military-style men in America’s capital are disconcerting, in part, because absent identifying signs of actual authority the rows of federal officers appear all-but indistinguishable from the open-carrying, white militia members cos-playing as survivalists who have gathered in other recent protests against pandemic stay-at-home orders. Some protesters have compared the anonymous armed officers to Russia’s “Little Green Men,” the soldiers-dressed-up-as-civilians who invaded and occupied western Ukraine. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to President Donald Trump Thursday demanding that federal officers identify themselves and their agency.

To understand the police forces ringing Trump and the White House it helps to understand the dense and not-entirely-sensical thicket of agencies that make up the nation’s civilian federal law enforcement. With little public attention, notice and amid historically lax oversight, those ranks have surged since 9/11—growing by roughly 2,500 officers annually every year since 2000. To put it another way: Every year since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has added to its policing ranks a force larger than the entire Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).